CONS

• Initial raw conversion is slightly more detailed in some competing products
• Requires subscription

Adobe Color

The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 2024 (x64) includes Adobe Color, Monochrome, Landscape, Neutral, Portrait, Standard, and Vivid. Adobe Color is the default for newly imported photos. It gets a bit more contrast, warmth, and vividness out of the photo than Adobe Standard, which is the same as the previous version of Lightroom. You can thankfully now turn on lens-profile corrections for everything you import, rather than making you go down and turn them on for every photo after importing.

For several of my test shots, particularly of color portraits and landscapes, I now find Lightroom Classic’s initial rendering as satisfactory as Capture One’s, though I prefer the less juiced-up Portrait profile for many photos rather than the default Color profile, which I find oversaturated. Any photos you’ve already imported will retain the legacy Adobe Standard Profile, so you may want to go back and switch that to Adobe Color or one of the others if you’re working on an older shot.

Camera Matching Profiles are based on your camera manufacturer’s image rendering. As you might surmise, they’re designed to match what you see on your camera LCD or the JPG the camera produces. I found them less effective than Adobe’s Profiles. In test portraits shot on a Canon EOS 1Ds some were too cool, and others were oversaturated.

Monochrome Profile

The Monochrome Profile is a better option than starting with a color Profile and then converting to black-and-white. That’s because it starts from the raw camera image. Portrait is supposed to reproduce all skin tones accurately, and Landscape adds a lot more vibrancy, since there are no face tones to worry about distorting. Neutral has the least contrast, useful for difficult lighting situations, and Vivid punches up saturation and contrast.

The Creative Profiles may remind many people of Instagram filters. I’m disappointed that they have names like Artistic 01, Modern 04, and so on. I’d prefer names that give you a sense of what the effect does. Despite that quibble, the Creative Profiles really do add moods, usually without being overdone. In some cases, they produce a one-step improvement. The 17 B&W choices are remarkably varied, too.

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Enhance Details and Super Resolution

Another relatively new tool for raw camera files is Enhance Details, which is available in both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom. The feature is intended to clarify complex parts of an image. It’s a very subtle effect, and for many photos, it doesn’t do a whole lot, especially for parts of the photo that have a consistent texture, such as the sky. You access the feature from the Photo menu (or from a right-click menu), and then it shows you a dialog with a detailed view of your shot. Running it creates a new DNG file. It’s a very compute-intensive operation, and even crashed my system on one occasion.

For some shots, the difference wasn’t noticeable at all, and on others it was only noticeable at 2:1 magnification. I did see more detail in a shot of wet pavement, and it could certainly make a meaningful difference in a large print. However, it doesn’t feel close to a 30% improvement in detail. In the following shot, the gravel on the right side looks more gravelly:

More Detail

In the shot below, the medallion shows more detail to my eyes (though not to those of some of my coworkers). Still, I’m not convinced that it has 30% more detail. PCMag’s camera analyst Jim Fisher tried the feature in the macOS version on his 5K iMac and found similarly minimal changes to the images.

A newer, related feature is Super Resolution, which you can apply to the selected photo from the Photo > Enhance menu item or by right-clicking and choosing Enhance. The tool works with JPGs rather than raw files and is intended to improve old, low-megapixel images. In my view, its AI edits give photos an artificial look, though it does smooth out pixelation.

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Photo Adjustment

In the Develop mode, sliders for adjustments like Exposure, Contrast, and Blacks all sit right in the middle of their tracks at zero, letting you slide them up and down. Having everything set to a 0 baseline and slider motion up to 100 and down to -100 makes good sense. It’s possible to adjust multiple photos at once, by selecting them on the filmstrip along the bottom and tapping the Auto Sync button. You can be very specific about which adjustments you want to synchronize. The button always shows when auto-syncing is enabled. A tooltip now displays the number of images the develop settings will be applied to.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 2024 (x64) that the Auto Settings button, tucked next to the Tone group of controls, has been sped up, but it’s still far from instant. There’s also an Auto button in Library mode’s Quick Develop panel that does the same thing. I’m seldom thrilled with its results, though it is effective on photos with very poor lighting. I find that it often results in overly bright, contrast-y images.

shadow and highlight recovery tools

The program’s shadow and highlight recovery tools let you bring out a dark face without blowing out the bright sky in an image, for example. You can also do this with an adjustment brush, but the effect is more natural when applied with Lightroom Classic’s Highlights and Shadows sliders. Most photo apps these days, however, include shadow adjustment, even the free Microsoft Photos and Apple Photos. A basic behavior of all the lighting sliders is that moving them to the left always darkens the image, to the right brightens. Other programs have less consistent controls.

In addition to the sliders, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 2024 (x64) offers a Photoshop-like Tone Curve adjustment tool that was updated in the latest release. You can not only drag sections of the curve up and down to brighten and darken the original values, but also use a control directly on the photo to brighten and darken areas with the same brightness value. You can switch between parametric and point curves. The first option simply divides your image into four ranges—highlights, lights, darks, and shadows—to which the curve edits limit you. The old-school point curve option lets you specify an exact luminosity value and adjust that. Now you can even pin a control point and adjust its value numerically.

Area-specific adjustments

Area-specific adjustments are possible with Lightroom Classic’s Adjustment Brush tool. The Adjustment Brush lets you apply white balance, noise reduction, and moiré removal to specific areas of an image. You can also use the Hue slider with local adjustments. It can be very useful for images in which you want different hues for different parts of the photo, such as a face that looks too red.

The relatively new Texture slider lets you either soften or increase details in a photo. Notice I didn’t say “sharpen,” since the Texture tool is designed to avoid the severe edges that sharpening usually adds. You can use Texture as either a global or local adjustment.

You can also use it to smooth faces without giving them an artificial, doll-like look. The tool affects the medium-size details rather than the fine, tiny details that Sharpen affects. In the image below, increasing the Texture slider adds detail, but doesn’t affect noise in the sky the way Sharpen does

Next up is the opposite case, where you want smoothing. Here, Texture is set to -38 on the right side. For me, it’s still a bit too powdery, but I like how it preserved the whiskers:

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Mask Selections

For its Latest update, Adobe added a new Masking panel in Develop mode, with a dotted-circle icon. It borrows heavily from Photoshop, offering Select Subject and Select Sky to the program’s Brush, Linear Gradient, Radial Gradient, Color Range, and Luminance Range selection tools, gathering them all into one panel.

The Subject Select tool did an excellent job finding not only people but animals and other objects, even with complex backgrounds. The example below is a simple sky background, but selecting the bird enabled me to jack up the shadows and exposure of the bird (which was nearly black in the original) without affecting the sky color. If a mask includes more or less than you want, you can add to or subtract from the selection.

The sky color in that shot is nothing to write home about, you say? I’m glad you mention it! We can use the new sky Select Sky tool and crank up the blue saturation. In the image below, the left side shows the picture I started with, and on the right is how it looked after fixing it with the new selection tools.

Upright Perspective Correction

The Upright tool, which corrects geometric distortion that comes from pointing your camera up at a subject, for example, is something Lightroom Classic shares with Photoshop. In Develop mode, under Transform, you see the Upright option, which attempts to correct perspective problems such as those you get with wide-angle lenses.

In addition to Off, you have five modes of operation for this tool: Level, Auto, Vertical, Guided, and Full. The Guided option is possibly the best. I tried it out on a cityscape and an indoor shot, and the result was a definite improvement compared with the original’s off-kilter angles.

Conclusion:

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic 2024 v6.5.0 (x64) remains the gold standard in pro photo workflow software. It’s a complete package, with top-notch organization tools, state-of-the-art adjustments, and all the output and printing options you could want.